The present invention relates to a visual knowledge publisher system for authoring and delivering virtual support center applications.
In order to provide prompt and convenient service for customers, many companies have established customer support call centers. These centers provide one or more telephone numbers a customer can use to receive service and support information about various products. Typically, a customer experiencing a problem with or having a question about a particular product or service or having questions or difficulty installing or configuring a product or service will call the corresponding support center to receive specific information relating to the question or problem and preferably, instructions for resolving the problem.
However, these customer support call centers suffer from at least the following problems. First, staffing a call center with enough knowledgeable operators, also called agents or customer service representatives, to address a meaningful range of likely problems can be very expensive. The call center must hire enough agents to handle those times when most calls occur, or callers could have excessively long hold times before speaking to an agent. Long hold times are annoying to customers and hurt a company's reputation for providing quality customer service. Long hold times are an even bigger problem when the company does not provide a toll-free number and the caller is required to pay for the call. Thus, a call center might have more agents than needed at any given time with their associated costs.
Second, the time and cost required to train new agents is considerable and in some cases it could be weeks before an agent is allowed to answer a call on his own. Agents staffing the support center must be provided with the knowledge necessary to resolve common product and service related questions and problems. Often, because of the large scope of potential problems, it is simply not practical to impart the required information (i.e. the problem knowledge base) to each agent. For example, many of today's complex products require a team of engineers—each having a specialized area of expertise—to design, build, and service the products. Thus, a single person may not have all the information needed to solve a particular problem.
Third, the job of an agent is often very repetitive, and turnover can be high as agents lose interest in their work and quit their jobs. The most common customer support questions can represent up to 80% of all calls received. Turnover of 50% or greater is not unusual. For example, for a company with 100 agents experiencing 50% turnover, 50 agents would quit in a 12-month period. High turnover adds additional costs to the customer support call center for recruiting and training.
Furthermore, some companies provide field technicians to service their products and services at the customer location. The field technicians may be employees of the company or third party providers who may not be well trained on the products and services they support. The field technicians may have questions or problems that arise in servicing the customer's products and services, and may call into a special call center staffed by more experienced technical agents, engineers or programmers. This technical staff could spend a significant amount time on the phone with a field technician due to the difficulty of the problem, the experience level of the field technician or the infrequency of occurrence of the particular problem. Field technician calls can be very expensive to the company considering the high cost of technical agents, engineers and programmers. In addition, the call center technical staff could be productively deployed elsewhere if less time were required on the phone.
In an attempt to automate call centers, some companies have tried using prerecorded messages to provide answers to various common problems. Typically, a caller will hear simple audio recordings of portions of a spoken dialog that identify specific topics or problems. The caller is asked to press a certain key on his phone to identify the problem he is having. The caller will then hear another simple audio recording in the form of instructions for resolving a particular problem. These automated recordings are presented to the caller using what is called touch-tone Interactive Voice Response systems or IVR. Although the IVR instructions may resolve the aforementioned problems, the prerecorded solutions lack the flexibility to accept spoken inputs from the customer and tailor the response to the customer's specific situation. In addition, in order that the recordings be kept within a reasonable amount of time (since callers must memorize the instructions), the instructions may be simplified and generalized to such an extent that they do not provide sufficient help for the caller. Often, this results in unresolved problems and customer frustration. Alternatively, IVR is used by some customer support call centers for the caller to request a fax containing instructions for resolving a problem. This solution only works for callers who have fax machines and who are willing to wait for the fax to be sent which could be delayed by up to a day.
Another solution many companies have adopted is to establish websites to place product service information on the internet. These sites allow for detailed instructions with figures and graphics to be used. However, searching for these instructions for a specific product model is often confusing and finding the right set of instructions can be difficult, especially for a less experienced internet user. In addition, these sites have limited interactivity to address unique customer problems and specific questions, and obviously require that the customer has access to the internet.